A biography forum

Your consideration is appreciated, but unnecessary. My arguments were presented as a fellow player instead of as a moderator - I play here too, you know.

Speaking of which...

After some deliberation, a compromise has been reached: The IC forum now has a “Guestbook Thread,” where new players may introduce new characters to the forum before posting. This should fulfill the best of both worlds; new players may test-drive their characters without generating unnecessary clutter, and in a thread that encourages them to enter the IC forums proper as soon as possible.

The guestbook seems like a great idea. Looking around, it seems like a new player could get a bit lost trying to figure out what to do; the new thread should hopefully solve this problem.

Great, Causaltity, very good.

as I stated quite early in this thread (and being a new player myself still), the IC board is the place to go for what is desired by 4eyes. Giving it a real "NEW Players can start here and look HERE" thing is leveling up the IC board instead of dividing attention with "another IC Forum". Also the explicit expalantion of the OOC function is nice.
Only time and new members will tell if the system works.

What a pleasant surprise! I look forward to that!

It may be a little soon to say, but it seems people aren't using it much, I've seen several new characters pop up, and for now the only post is Abad's. Maybe edit the title to make it clearer it's for the new members to present themselves?

On a related point, I'd love to see more people making use of FourEyes' "Our Storylines" thread, pinned above. It's a really useful way to follow characters we're interested in, and it's useful for newbies like myself. And don't just post the role play threads, include extranet posting that's relevant, too :)

While I get where you going with it, that's a pretty big request. A lot of people on the old boards had thousands of posts, in hundreds of threads. Even cutting out the irrelevant extranet postings, it'd make almost every character's page quite long and cluttered, with more links than most people are willing to dig up.

Done.

That is the last I am editing that post to make it "more player-friendly," however. There are only so many "welcomes" one can stuff into an OP before it starts looking like a Final Fantasy Tutorial.

It could also be that a lot of new characters are alts of people who don't miss the biography forum, because it was useless.

Fair point. I certainly agree that we don't want too much clutter (certainly I'll be including a lot less extranet threads now I've got the first load up as an introduction to the characters - just the really major ones and role plays from now on, to keep it manageable). I'm just eager to see more plotlines and character moments collected together, especially since I think new readers and potential members will find it more convenient as an introduction to the board. You long-standing members have played through some brilliant stories. Having the characters' histories at hand like that would be welcome.

For an old member the relevant posts/threads be the ones that he still remembers after all this time because how cool they were, so I don't think a full-on archive exploring would be necessary.